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Sartre's Theory Of Ambiguity

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Firstly, de Beauvoir begins her hypothesis that women are free from all bondage and have no fixed essence embedded in their being. For her, nothing is fixed in advance; everything is in the process of becoming, a process of creating and making his or her own essence. The problem arises when women became oppressed and discriminated throughout the history. They are dictated by what they should do in a situation; they are dictated on what they should wear in an event; they are even manipulated on their decisions in life. They are considered inferior in the society. This inferiority affects not just their political and social life but also their whole humanity. Women became the Other as to what de Beauvoir said in her book The Second Sex because …show more content…

However, she did not fully dwell on Sartre’s concept; she also applied her own concept of freedom – an opportunity for human freedom. She applied the concept of ambiguity. Ambiguity means that someone or something that has no clear and exact meaning or in other words, many meanings. For de Beauvoir, human beings are ambiguous. There is no exact meaning of what is a human being like. The feeling of anguish, forlornness, and despair can be justified because of the ambiguity of human beings. That consequences that Sartre talked about might be just one of the possible consequences of human freedom, primarily because human beings are ambiguous. One example of human beings’ ambiguity is their uniqueness. Like among the 10 soldiers, who received the same training, they differ on the level of their expertise. Perhaps, one would be expert in shooting, or the other one is expert in combat- fighting. These explain that human beings have many meanings. Like in history, women in Greek are considered as second to men, but in the Philippines, it is not. The women in the Philippines are favored most in the society. They received same privileges as the men. The Philippines is considered as a matriarchal society. With this, it truly supports that human beings are

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However she warns us of adhering ourselves to such groups especially when we abandon our own critical thinking processes and accept a group's set of morals to be the universal truth. As Simone de Beauvoir writes in The Second Sex ““No group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against itself.” (44) ‘They’ can’t belong in our group because ‘we’ don’t belong in their group. This is how the notion of the Other is established. Didion condemns this as she says a person's actions does not “confer upon anyone any ipso facto virtue.”

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In these two scenes and in many other scenes and quotes throughout the book beauty is portrayed in a way that does not solely depend on outward appearance and is not defined by normative standards of class, sex, gender, sexuality, and femininity. Simone de Beauvoir’s thoughts in “The Second Sex” also agree with these statements by reiterating the fact that the “feminine woman” is a social construct and that society has controlled how people are supposed to think about normative beauty and women. Beauty cannot be defined. A woman cannot be defined. Beauty is an intersectional concept that includes all identities and all people regardless of outward appearance or what society says is beautiful.

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Forcefully scrutinized all through his lifetime, de la Barre 's thoughts were restored in the twentieth century by scholar Simone de Beauvoir. In view of reason and perception, the contrast between the genders is exclusively physical, since the brain “has no sex”. What causes contrasts between psyches are instruction, religious recognition, and environment, not sexual orientation. Minute anatomical investigation shows no distinctions in the heads of men versus women, with the exception of women ' sense organs are "typically more delicate". Since women have imperative apparatuses body and brain, there is no motivation behind why they wouldn 't be similarly as able as men in learning material science or pharmaceutical.

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Feminist Reading: Dracula between Beauvoir’s and Roth’s Ideas In her article, “Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” Phyllis Roth argues that Dracula is a misogynistic novel which is obvious in the system of power in which men are dominant and active figures whereas women are just followers and obedient to their system. She draws on Simon de Beauvoir’s idea that “ambivalence as an intrinsic quality of Eternal Feminine”, in order to show that women are victims to men powers. In her chapter, “Myth and Reality”, Beauvoir discusses the way that anybody in the society, specially men, doesn’t do their job in taking a step towards the oppressed women, but to act just like what the system of myth impose them to act.

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Many women felt that they were residing under a power that disrespected the traditional values they

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Intersectionality has been considered an essential aspect of feminist and queer theory, particularly within the last twenty years. Theorist began to recognize that without considering other avenues of oppression their ideas would only go so far and apply to a limited number of people. While recognition and application are innately different, both queer and feminist works have made real attempts to be more inclusive. Yet in many of the attempts made, there is a faltering in what it means to truly be intersectional. Simply mentioning race and class in addition to gender and sexuality is not enough.

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Ambiguity in literature means having certain aspects in a story open to be interpreted in different ways. Texts that are ambiguous have benefits compared to a text that is not. The stories can be viewed from different positions like feminism, race and culture. Ambiguous texts can also have open views on the literary devices used like the colour blue could mean sadness or it could mean could mean cleansing. Ambiguity can also affect the way the characters are being portrayed as.

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In her book, Beauvoir does not deny the apparent differences of men and women in a biological sense. Although given those, she argues that those differences are defined by culture, not “natural facts”, and is not sufficient to give a good reason to oppress

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To demonstrate, women conditions are not supported by hormones, it is only shaped by culture and society. Thus, being a woman is a sign of subordination, weakness, and passivity. For instance, a girl child is not born weak and submissive by nature rather, culture and society determine this fate for her. In other words, a woman is culturally programmed to think and act in a certain manner and hence, a woman has always been constructed as an "other." In this regard, de Beauvoir refers to the master-slave relationship and the slave 's awareness of his subordination, to urge women about her emancipation.

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In her detailed description of woman’s “situation,” Beauvoir analyses how women are made to give up transcendence, their existential right, and adopt a constrained, repetitive imprisonment. She asserts that“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (Beauvoir, “Introduction”). In the same study, “The Second Sex”, she also stresses (while talking about woman) that “She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other” (Beauvoir, “Introduction”).This “circumscribed, repetitive imprisonment” and the process of “becoming a woman”(Beauvoir, “Introduction”) is what leads to the formation of “cultural constructs” that become the definition of a woman’s existence. Drawing on these ideas of Beauvoir, writer and critic Toril Moi explains the term “femininity” as a “cultural construct” in her essay “Feminist, Female, Feminine”.

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The world we live in today has a gender barrier that is slowly being transformed. Imagine a world where if you were born a female you would immediately be thought of as an object rather than a living, breathing person. The only reason you would be valuable is because you could do the housework. You had zero access to an education, no voice, and no freedom. You are limited to do only things men viewed as “feminine” which was a very small list.

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The argument Jean-Paul Sartre, a French philosopher, presents on existentialism helps to prove the foundation which is “existence precedes essence”. Existentialism is normally understood as an ideology that involves evaluating existence itself and the way humans find themselves existing currently in the world. For the phrase existence precedes essence, existence’s etymology is exsistere or to stand out while the term Essence means “being” or “to be” therefore the fundamental of existentialism, literally means to stand out comes before being. This can be taken into many different ideas such as individuals having to take responsibility for their own actions and that in Sartre’s case the individual is the sole judge of his or her own actions. According to him, “men is condemned to be free,” therefore “the destiny of man is placed within himself.”

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